Gameplay and Quality of Life Improvements

I've spent the last month ticking a bunch of little things off the gameplay / quality of life to-do list because that's less intimidating than working on more important shit. Here are some highlights:

Cryopod Improvements

I took a bit of time to work on stability problems with the cryopod (time acceleration is hard) and made some marginal gains on that front, but I'm more excited about the new quality of life improvements. There's now a throttle warning light outside of the pod, which I think is a big improvement over just pushing the button and wondering why nothing is happening. This tripped me up all the time after getting kicked out of warp and it bugged the shit out of me but then I was like, huh, I'm the dev, I guess I can fix that. I also added readouts to indicate the nearest station, your distance from it, and your distance to safe warp range. So you no longer have to target the station you're departing just to see when you've left warp inhibitor range. These were easy things to add but they've really improved the gameplay experience, at least for me as a player.

New Planet & Moons

This was a bit of a sidetrack, but I wanted to add some new places to explore for a the small handful of weirdos out there actually looking forward to this update. There's a new rocky planet beyond the orbit of Tyra called FuShen, based sorta kinda on Mars, but named after a Chinese god of happiness instead of a Roman god of war. Call me a hippie. The actual moons of Mars are too small to play nicely with my orbital simulation so they've been altered beyond recognition in a way that I hope will provide new orbital mechanics challenges. The near moon, Mekka, is a human-built superstructure which will be the in-fiction production facility for the exotic handwavium that powers the warp drive. The far moon, Mirchick, is a small, irregularly shaped, natural moon. There are 7 new stations in the FuShen system including Zazen City, the de facto capital city of The Sangha, and Juliano Station, named as a nod to Michael Juliano, the developer of Rogue System.

FuShen, Juliano Station, and Mekka

Ship Damage System

I'm currently working on implementing collision damage, wear & tear, and the ability to repair from garage terminals. This is a much simplified version of the eventual goal in which individual hardware components will accumulate damage and wear, and that damage will affect specific ship systems. For now, there are two very video gamey damage bars to manage: hull damage and systems damage. Hull damage accumulates slowly & naturally during flight and particularly during high thrust maneuvers, but is mostly there to penalize you for running into shit. Systems damage will build faster the harder you push the ship, and negatively affects your thrust power and fuel efficiency as it accumulates. The lower your hull health, the faster it will accumulate. My goal is that as long as you fly safe you'll rarely need to worry about paying for repairs, it's just another resource to consider and manage.

Coming Up Next

I did a bunch of other little things, too, but that's pretty much it. Spring is a busy time of year for me between beekeeping, fucking around in the yard and generally trying to spend time outside after a depressing Michigan winter, so development took a bit of a backseat this month and probably will continue to do so for a few weeks. But I've been forcing myself to work on Black Road Sky for at least a few minutes every day just to keep in the groove and I'm pretty happy with the progress I've made. Once I wrap up the damage / repair system I'm planning on getting back into modeling & graphics in an attempt to make good on my stated goal of "making the game look less like shit".